Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the translation of computer generated text and more particularly to the crowd-sourced translation of textual content in a network distributable file.
Description of the Related Art
The process of translating a source document from one language to another historically required a speaker of both the source language of the document and a target language of the document in order to manually create a translated document incorporating the translated content of the source document. Prior to the advent of the Internet, the task of translating documentation and source code for a computer program from one language to another in support of an internationalization effort similarly required the manual exercise of a speaker of both source and target languages performing a manual translation. However, with the advent of the Internet, and the resulting explosion of global users seeking access to computer distributable text, the manual process of translation rapidly became unworkable.
To supplant the manual process of translating computer distributable text from one language to another, several different automated processes had been developed. A most common process is that of machine translation. In its most basic form, machine translation parses a source document in one language replacing each word of the source language with a corresponding translation of the word in a target language. Of course, the resultant translate document will seldom reflect a proper translation given the nuances of one language over the other. As such, more advanced forms of machine translation utilize statistical analysis to best determine a context of parsed text to produce a more accurate translation.
Given that the differences between different languages can be substantial, machine translation oftentimes is supplemented with a crowd-sourced manual effort in which different members of the public all speaking the same language pair are tasked with the translation of different portions of a common document such that the resultant translation of each portion can be re-assembled into a translated document. While each member participating in a crowd-sourced translation may utilize machine translation, ultimately each member participating in the crowd-sourced translation may also manually refine the resultant translated text from machine translation to ensure its integrity as a proper translation of the source text. Of course, crowd-sourcing the translation of a document requires at the outset knowledge of the identity of a sufficient number of speakers of the source and target language so as to effectively apportion translation assignments to the participants.